Lessons From A Legend: 997 Gt3 Gets The Grip Game Just Right

An old mate - fancies himself a philosopher-petrolhead - reckons we all fall into one of three categories. When it comes to cars he says ultimately you're either an engine, design or chassis bod.

I suppose I have always been for chassis, which is to say I seem to get a bigger kick from feeling what the car is doing beneath me than I do from listening to the motor or from any poor internal attempts to intellectualise the design. Now, clearly there are relativities.

In absolute terms I don't find the languid playfulness of a Kia Stinger GT more life-affirming than the sound of a Huracán Performante being drilled through the Hindhead Tunnel. But if I look back at times when a car has actually made me laugh out loud, it's most often been handling-related. Some impossibly deft tippy-toe rotation, or a physics-defying, velvety landing. There's something magical about a lump of metal and oil becoming truly delicate and balletic.

I wondered which camp would I most want to be in today, and by extension which group is suffering most. The engine-ites will raise their hands fastest and fair enough. Today, the only way to get a performance car with a naturally aspirated engine and a manual 'box through which to enjoy it is to be very, very rich and worm your way into some special edition-or, for only a little less hassle, secure a Porsche 911 GT3 build slot. Or just buy a Mazda MX-5. But those are really your only options, with everything having gone automatic, turbocharged or fully electric.

The design crowd will also feel aggrieved, with the SUV takeover of the world and increasingly homogenised styling in nearly every class. Perhaps the most exciting things happening at the moment are retro revivals, but much as I like the look of the Renault 5 et al, it's not healthy.

Which leaves chassis-land, which I didn't think had been degraded too much. Phew. But that was until I had a blast in a 997-era GT3 RS last week. Yes, I adored the bellowing Mezger, especially when it comes on cam at 4500rpm. And yes, it's a ripper to behold: mad and serious but diminutive and neat. And yet the defining bit of the package, and what makes this middle-aged RS a surprisingly brilliant and fun road car today, is the balance of grip and slip.

It's Goldilocks stuff. You can steer an RS of this generation on the throttle or brake without ever over-driving it. It's brilliant because the car doesn't achieve this by being twitchy or confidence-sapping the rest of the time. The handling is so damn malleable and expressive in a way that doesn't really exist any more, at least within this apex predator automotive stratum.

So where did it go awry? A lot of the RS's easy-going handling charm is to do with the lack of mass and its rear-driven layout, and of course its suspension geometry. In short, being a 997 GT3 RS. But it would mean nothing if the car simply generated too much rear grip. And that's the issue: grip. These days the serious performance cars have too much of it. They're over-evolved for the job of entertaining their owners on the road via means other than speed.

Ah, but today's cars have so much power and torque, which levels things out because you can overcome the grip so easily. Except that's only exploitable on track or in an exceptionally well-sighted corner. Most of the time the extra power and torque is meaningless if you don't want to drive a car that (a) requires huge speed and inertia to come alive or (b) requires you to thuggishly boot it. Brute shove really is meaningless if you're talking about altering the attitude of the car during braking, when a stubbornly planted tail kills the show.

You can't just blame tyre sizes. The 997 RS wears a 19in wheel compared with the 21in rims of the current iteration, but these are still fitted with 325-section rears. I think the issue is that track widths have become too wide and rubber compounds too effective. Only one of those elements is realistically going to change in today's safety-conscious world. And if it doesn't? Well, rather than sun for a special day of driving, we could well be praying for rain.